Xisor wrote:I'm pretty certain that the fundamental elements are peril and thrill, that death and killing is ancillary (but not exactly uncommon) to that. Else games like Football Manager, the Sims, Pokemon Go, and Rocket League really wouldn't be as successful as they are. (And less benignly why bloodsports persist, but idly killing animals for the hell of it isn't a day to day activity everybody indulges in at the drop of a hat.)

Nevertheless, I think you're right that as a species, we're perhaps a bit more ghoulish than you'd imagine from how we describe ourselves.

Well, I was talking mainly about wargamers and fantasy/sci-fans, especially Wh40k fans . Existence of lots of other fun things that don't involve bloodshed just proves my point XD .

Xisor wrote:A hop skip and a jump from that and just some minutes ago I read through this article on autism's presentation in women, amongst a huge other line of thoughts.

It's very interesting, and not something widely discussed, but whilst it's fairly academic the topic isn't at all dry (really fascinating, and not to mention moving observations), and as a qualitative study even the data is fairly accessible.

Yeah, neurodiversity tends to manifest differently between genders. Like for example ADHD in girls tends to manifest itself with talking a lot.

Ironically, I've read about it the first time, like 10 or 15 years ago on webpage of a female miniatures painter.

EDIT:One thing that it makes me wonder about is how being on autism spectrum manifests in values-based types. As in ENFPs for example. Like in a lot of stuff I'm struggling/struggled with like dyspraxia, sensory sensitivity, ADHD, etc. tends to be comorbid with autism.

"There can be no bystanders in the battle for survival. Anyone who will not fight by your side is an enemy you must crush" -Scriptorus Munificantus

Ah, I get you. Makes things more clear, but I still think the 'killing is cool!' element of wargames (etc), isnt very morbid at all. Or at least, predominantly it isn't.

By a slight analogy: three of my friends who're all massive military history buffs (WW2, WW1, and Byzantine/Late Roman Empire) are amongst the most peaceful, officious, easy going people I know. I'm sceptical of the idea thatvtheir avid fascination with the military is due to how it goes about killing people. (Similarly how most Catholics aren't actually literally operating under the idea that they're 100% cannibals when they take communion.)

But I digress. For some people, they definitely are into it for the more ghoulish side, but I think that's incidental for most people. (And I'm not sure where I stand on the morality of being into it for morbid reasons. My gut says "they're probably psycopaths!", but thats probably the same bit of the gut that in other people manifests as "even the most minor kink is creepy immoral perversion")

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I went around and around for a long while on the Big 5 earlier this year, convinced that I had 0% conscientiousness. Not my finest hours! But you're right, the comorbity and diversity of presentations is probably huge. Thinking in terms of M-B stuff is probably oversimplifying it a touch, but it's probably the easiest to talk about whilst still keeping the idea intact.

One of the major ideas I'd seen bandied about, but not resolved definitively, is the idea that autism is a sixth big factor, and that it may have sub-factors that correspond to different pieces of autistic behaviour (e.g. disposition to stimming, ability to cope with overstimulation, social awareness).

But I genuinely dont know enough about any of it to talk with much insight or use on it, except in some vague generalities.

Even looking at it in a Big 5 style, we're talking about clustering humans on their ability to perceive and acknowledge the various differences between the clusters. If you add autistic tendencies as a sixth dimension/factor, then our mental picture/map of the social world becomes horribly complicated and difficult.

You can see why, as a species, it seems mostly to be handled subconsciously! But, I think it's that subconscious perception is what keeps people from *really* crossing the neurotypical-neurodiverse social barrier with any great, widely reproducible skill.

And, indeed, why the less efficient bits of any given person's psyche lead them into no end of stress in trying to figure things out.

It's a hell of a tangle, alright!

"When my housemate puts his bike in the middle of the living room floor, I find that inordinately jarring, annoying and rude, but for me to refer to it as "genocide" would be incorrect." -Athxisor.wordpressXisor's Dice-o-matic Maiminator

In how-am-I news, I'm horrified to find out I'm running out of Moroccan Mint tea.

And in this heat!?

"When my housemate puts his bike in the middle of the living room floor, I find that inordinately jarring, annoying and rude, but for me to refer to it as "genocide" would be incorrect." -Athxisor.wordpressXisor's Dice-o-matic Maiminator

Oh damn, was in hospital on Friday night/Saturday. I have a nasty migraine that includes nausea and occasional facial numbness, hypertension and liver problems. Luckily it turned out I don't have any neurological stuff like stroke or something.I happened to unwittingly go to a toxic hospital that people avoid and has bad reviews - 2/3 of doctors there were mean and they didn't even have warm water. Also, it was impossible to buy water or food there, so I had to go to sleep without supper. Almost every other hospital I saw has a buffet and wending machines.

There's a big problem of some hospitals/doctors treating patients as machines. They probably should have been engineers not working with most vulnerable people.

Also, I recently realised that my weight gain has accelerated drastically since I started dieting in 2009 or 2010. God damn it. Last time I was dieting was in 2016 when I lost 10kg in half a year and then I was feeling cold and hungry all the time until I regained it all in another half-a-year. And that's despite that I was on a modest caloric deficit when dieting.

tfw. when I started dieting I weighted 110kg and women were still somewhat attracted to me and ended up weighting around 150kg and completely unattractive and with a host of health problems.

Wish I knew it, like 10 years ago. Also realised that I wasn't interpreting diet that I'm trying to be in but fail due to eating sweet comfort food:It promises losing weight without being hungry and yo-yo effect and says that one should eat while hungry while advising fasting and lower fat intake to fat people. Except that it implies that one shouldn't restrict fat intake to lose weight if it's causing hunger. Unfortunately the author forgot to spell it out.

Last edited by Therion on Tue Jul 31, 2018 1:37 am, edited 2 times in total.

"There can be no bystanders in the battle for survival. Anyone who will not fight by your side is an enemy you must crush" -Scriptorus Munificantus

Sounds like a bit of a miserable hospital experience, to put it mildly. On the upside: result on finding out about the liver.

And for diets, I'd heard over a few years the attestation that 'dieting, on average and over a long period of time, leads to weight gain for most people'.

The reasoning around this is multifold, and somewhat speculative, but is something like this:- it's not being incorporated into your intended 'final state' - e.g. living on 1800kcal a day, for the rest of your life.- people are atrocious at self-control, they'll dive in with big expectations and modest self-determination then, eventually/inevitably, fall off the wagon and rebound.

You get the idea.

From what I've heard from MDs on podcasts/blogs, it sounds like the sensible advice is along these lines:- get some more exercise. Incorporate it into your life, don't expect one day to cut back on exercise: treat it as a new part of your life, here to stay. (Which also means: don't go wild in committing to four hours in the gym, evert hour. For one, it's too ambitious to sustain. For two, time doesn't work that way. That'd be four hours of exercise every hour. The mind boggles, but I bet the body would rebel.)

- slow, steady changes.

- Count calories. Not in infinite detail, but in a sense of 'this meal is roughly five hundred, that snack is another two hundred, and those plums that were in the icebox, were another two hundred', but so you've an actual idea of how much food your eating, day to day. This knowledge alone might give the fortitude to say no to unnecessary snacks, without overwhelmingly altering your diet.

- varied diet. It's an oldie, but it fits - a good quantity and also a fair variety of veg, some decent meat if you're able, and not an unholy amount of sugar (e.g. don't just switch to 50,000 apples a day). Don't go wild on cutting out things you like, but if you can cut down (e.g. rather than a box of biscuits, how about just two biscuits) then that'll work nicely.

For my part, I've had vague success with this. Calorie counting is difficult, because I forget about it far too easily, but I've gotten pretty good at having a small pile of salad with any cooked meal, simply as routine.

I've come some distance from when this was routine with dinners when I was staying with my dad back in...2010-2013. As we'd often have a roast/meat-and-two-veg [quiet you in the back!], with a bowl of salad beside, I'd often inadvertently [and after the first few times: very intentionally] have what I liked to call 'Scottish Salad Dressing', which is to say: gravy on the salad. /

And for exercise: Swimming, and now even running(!?!?! ) - thanks to the Couch to 5k app - seem to at least be easily accommodated into my life. More, I quite like swimming, so it's a bit of an indulgence too.

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Re:How are we?

I have a holiday booked in Canada, late July to mid-August.

I am not presently in Canada.

More news as we get it.

"When my housemate puts his bike in the middle of the living room floor, I find that inordinately jarring, annoying and rude, but for me to refer to it as "genocide" would be incorrect." -Athxisor.wordpressXisor's Dice-o-matic Maiminator

Xisor wrote:Sounds like a bit of a miserable hospital experience, to put it mildly. On the upside: result on finding out about the liver.

And for diets, I'd heard over a few years the attestation that 'dieting, on average and over a long period of time, leads to weight gain for most people'.

The reasoning around this is multifold, and somewhat speculative, but is something like this:- it's not being incorporated into your intended 'final state' - e.g. living on 1800kcal a day, for the rest of your life.- people are atrocious at self-control, they'll dive in with big expectations and modest self-determination then, eventually/inevitably, fall off the wagon and rebound.

You get the idea.

Nah. It's mostly connected to the role of fat tissue which is protecting from dying from starvation and to effects of caloric restriction on health. And to make it worse, being fat doesn't enable safe living off fat tissue or being fully functional during it.Most important thing to understand is that human organism doesn't differentiate between losing weight from dieting and famine. And that's where the whole concept of dieting fails.

Hence both poverty and dieting usually feature malnutrition/binge-eating cycle. There's no "atrociousness at self-control" in context of the yo-yo effect - it exists in context of portion control, emotional eating, etc. which I will talk a bit later but it's not really relevant to what I'm talking about. I'm talking about about symptoms of malnutrition. The most damaging thing that dieting culture has done is presenting caloric restriction as somehow not being a form of malnutrition.

As the men lost weight, their physical endurance dropped by half, their strength about 10%, and their reflexes became sluggish… The men’s resting metabolic rates declined by 40%, their heart volume shrank about 20%, their pulses slowed and their body temperatures dropped. They complained of feeling cold, tired and hungry; having trouble concentrating; of impaired judgment and comprehension; dizzy spells; visual disturbances; ringing in their ears; tingling and numbing of their extremities; stomach aches, body aches and headaches; trouble sleeping; hair thinning; and their skin growing dry and thin. Their sexual function and testes size were reduced and they lost all interest in sex. They had every physical indication of accelerated aging.

Depending on individual the symptoms can appear much faster. For example I get trouble concentrating, impaired judgement and comprehension, sluggish reflexes on any caloric deficit when awake. Leaving modest deficit for night like 300-400kcal resulted in worse sleep, with crazy deficits like 1000kcal per day, it would also include waking up in the middle of the night from hunger.

But dieting culture makes people somehow treat it as business as usual. Like people somehow find it completely natural that they feel ill, lose basic functionality, etc. in the name of diet.

…they became obsessed with food, thinking, talking and reading about it constantly; developed weird eating rituals; began hoarding things; consumed vast amounts of coffee and tea; and chewed gum incessantly (as many as 40 packages a day). Binge eating episodes also became a problem as some of the men were unable to continue to restrict their eating in their hunger.

Stuff like this pretty much guarantees disrupted relationship with eating even after the physical damage done by dieting is healed.

Xisor wrote:- Count calories. Not in infinite detail, but in a sense of 'this meal is roughly five hundred, that snack is another two hundred, and those plums that were in the icebox, were another two hundred', but so you've an actual idea of how much food your eating, day to day. This knowledge alone might give the fortitude to say no to unnecessary snacks, without overwhelmingly altering your diet.

I have a spreadsheet for counting macro-nutrients and calories. Like, not for purposes of caloric restriction any more as I'm done with dieting but to not go overboard, especially with protein and carbs. These are the hardest due to overwhelming misery of living here. It's just constant stress and despair. Lately trying to find something more manageable. I wish there would be more stuff that comes in portions of, like 40-50g and doesn't have glucose-fructose syrup.It sucks that all the optimal diet stores went bankrupt because I wish I could just buy confectionery that isn't made overwhelmingly from sugar/glucose-fructose syrup/flour.

Though it still had problems with portions. Annoying thing that I noticed is that lots of stuff that actually tastes very good, makes it much harder to control portions due to spices and various taste combinations preventing normal sense of satiety.Some of that stuff:Vegetable salad, stuff with vanilla aroma like ice cream and cheesecake, apple pie.Like there's stuff that can must be eaten in near-infinite amounts until it runs out.

Xisor wrote:From what I've heard from MDs on podcasts/blogs, it sounds like the sensible advice is along these lines:- get some more exercise. Incorporate it into your life, don't expect one day to cut back on exercise: treat it as a new part of your life, here to stay. (Which also means: don't go wild in committing to four hours in the gym, evert hour. For one, it's too ambitious to sustain. For two, time doesn't work that way. That'd be four hours of exercise every hour. The mind boggles, but I bet the body would rebel.)

- slow, steady changes.

- Count calories. Not in infinite detail, but in a sense of 'this meal is roughly five hundred, that snack is another two hundred, and those plums that were in the icebox, were another two hundred', but so you've an actual idea of how much food your eating, day to day. This knowledge alone might give the fortitude to say no to unnecessary snacks, without overwhelmingly altering your diet.

My pretty much worst dieting experience was with a slow sustainable diet. That is I initially got diet from a doctor which was utterly insane - with, like 1400kcal deficit. Kept it for, like a week because I quickly started feeling cold and hungry all the time, was waking up at night from hunger, sometimes couldn't sleep, my libido just tanked.

Then after about a month, I tried with lower deficit, 400kcal, almost all of it kept for night. It worsened quality of my sleep but managed to do it for half-a-year and lost 10kg and then just crashed and ended up being hungry and feeling cold almost all the time, even when eating at caloric balance. It only stopped after I regained the weight I lost.

Basically all that advice is worthless for most of people when it comes to dropping weight. Yeah, some people have weird biology that makes it possible for them to live off fat tissue without experiencing symptoms of malnutrition just as there's a minority of people that can function normally on 4 hours of sleep per day. But for 80% of people it's not possible and results in months of suffering symptoms of malnutrition and then crashing and rebounding.Of course, the few people that maintain can maintain weight loss experience health benefits, while for the rest that regains weight both process of losing weight and inevitable regaining of weight is harmful.I knew one of these mutants and he was bewildered that I stop being fully functional on any caloric deficit - get dizziness, lowered cognitive abilities, lowered dexterity, etc. because according to him it happens only when having very low fat percentage. When I asked about it the owner of the blog analysing scientific papers on fatness, she told me these are typical symptoms of being on caloric deficit.

That's why it's necessary to hate the mutant, hate the alien. The mere existence of their alien biology is an existential threat as they seek to remake the society in their own image.

I already learned to hate the alien, the mutant, the heretic when dealing with the abominations that need just 4 hours of sleep as they try to remake the world so that no one would get enough sleep and enough time off work.

"There can be no bystanders in the battle for survival. Anyone who will not fight by your side is an enemy you must crush" -Scriptorus Munificantus

Picked up Kill Team last weekend and had rollicking good fun building the three Kill Teams I got. It's been 18+ years since I built anything and i'm certainly keen to get a Space Marine army going. But before I buy more models I best paint at least the Reiver Kill Team. Which happens to be this weekends task providing the paints turn up.

I'm really having to choose where to spend my time at the moment. I'm super busy at work; I want to do a bunch of free time/hobby stuff; and I have a course i'm on and another to start to up the career prospects. I'll be dead before I can have 5 minutes to glue some stuff together.

I'm really having to choose where to spend my time at the moment. I'm super busy at work; I want to do a bunch of free time/hobby stuff; and I have a course i'm on and another to start to up the career prospects. I'll be dead before I can have 5 minutes to glue some stuff together.

I have made a start on things. What I do need is a kick up the bum to finish the space marines that I have finalised a paint scheme for. I ended up going for do it yourself chapter, which is predominantly silver which I found to be really easy. The one thing I will have to look at though for the next lot I build is to paint at least the arms separately as I am finding that i'm getting paint all over the torso that I don't want there.

On topic though i'm doing good, though finding i'm trying to split my focus across to much and ending up not really getting much done. Like painting.